Henry David Thoreau's

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Henry David Thoreau's
Walden or, Life in the Woods
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Thoreaus Life

• Born July 1817
• Died of TB at age 44 in May 1862
• Educated at Harvard
• Long friendship with Emerson
• Mixed philosophy with action

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Beginnings at Walden pond

• Moved to pond on July 4, 1845
• Wrote first book and worked on journal
• Gardened and worked as a surveyor
• Went back to civilization in Sept 1847

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• I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it
  is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
  cattle, and farming tools for these are more
  easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they
  had been born in the open pasture and suckled by
  a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer
  eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who
  made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat
  their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat
  only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin
  digging their graves as soon as they are born?
  They have got to live a man's life, pushing all
  these things before them, and get on as well as
  they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I
  met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its
  load, creeping down the road of life, pushing
  before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its
  Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred
  acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and
  woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no
  such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it
  labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
  feet of flesh.

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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

• If it is asserted that civilization is a real
  advance in the condition of man, -- and I think
  that it is, though only the wise improve their
  advantages, -- it must be shown that it has
  produced better dwellings without making them
  more costly and the cost of a thing is the
  amount of what I will call life which is required
  to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
  long run.

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• Most of the luxuries and many of the so called
  comforts of life are not only dispensable, but
  positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
• Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is
  sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is
  greatly overrated and it is our selfishness
  which overrates it.

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• "As long as possible, live free and uncommitted"

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• "To be awake is to be alive"

"Our life is frittered away with detail"
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• "I went to the woods because I wished to live
  deliberately, to front only the essential facts
  of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
  to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
  that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what
  was not life, living is so dear nor did I wish
  to practice resignation, unless it was quite
  necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all
  the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
  Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not
  life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
  drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
  lowest terms, and, if it prove to be mean, why
  then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it,
  and publish its meaning to the world or if it
  were sublime, to know it by experience, and be
  able to give a true account of it in my
  next excursion."  

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In Conclusion